Consumer awareness of sustainable supply chains: A choice experiment on Parma ham PDO.

The food system produces emissions at all stages, from agriculture and its inputs, and the livestock sector is nowadays one of the most significant contributors to environmental problems. The European swine production system is mainly intensive and generates high external costs such as water and air pollution. As a response to these emerging issues, there is a growing interest in the relationships between marketing and sustainability, with people that have begun to pay much more attention to health, environmental friendliness, and quality of products. The aim of this study is to understand if there is a market for a high-quality "Parma ham PDO", produced in sustainable supply chain at an environmental, health and animal welfare level. In this paper, we use discrete choice experiments to investigate Italian consumer's preferences and their willingness to pay (WTP) for Parma ham PDO with different characteristics, amongst which the use of air scrubber technology reducing pollutants emissions. Results seem to encourage the pork industry in better exploring pollutant emissions' reduction, showing a consumers' willingness to pay for this production technology. Similarly, results of this study can suggest the existence of a niche market for this typology of production.

No More Glass Bottles? Canned Wine and Italian Consumers.

Packaging is an important economic component of the wine industry. However, while glass bottles are the leading wine container globally, their production and handling entail severe problems in increased carbon footprint impact and waste and logistic management. As a result, the wine packaging industry has developed and commercialised several alternatives to glass bottles, including aluminium cans. However, despite producers' efforts in proposing alternative wine packaging, there are several barriers to their diffusion, especially in countries with a long tradition of wine consumption such as Italy, and it is still uncertain if and to what degree consumers would appreciate a wine in an aluminium can. This research investigates Italian wine consumers' preferences and willingness to pay for canned wine through a survey and the contingent valuation method. We collected data from 551 consumers regarding attitudes and preferences about their wine consumption, alternative packaging acceptance, and motivations for accepting and refusing to buy it. Only a minority of the respondents declared they would buy canned wine, while the majority would refuse for reasons related to low-quality perception and poor consideration of alternative wine packaging. The lack of knowledge is one of the main obstacles to the diffusion of canned wine. However, canned wines could address different groups of wine drinkers and consumption occasions, increasing the opportunities for winemakers, especially among non-regular consumers.

Proton-proton correlations observed in two-proton radioactivity of 94Ag.

The stability and spontaneous decay of naturally occurring atomic nuclei have been much studied ever since Becquerel discovered natural radioactivity in 1896. In 1960, proton-rich nuclei with an odd or an even atomic number Z were predicted to decay through one- and two-proton radioactivity, respectively. The experimental observation of one-proton radioactivity was first reported in 1982, and two-proton radioactivity has now also been detected by experimentally studying the decay properties of 45Fe (refs 3, 4) and 54Zn (ref. 5). Here we report proton-proton correlations observed during the radioactive decay of a spinning long-lived state of the lightest known isotope of silver, 94Ag, which is known to undergo one-proton decay. We infer from these correlations that the long-lived state must also decay through simultaneous two-proton emission, making 94Ag the first nucleus to exhibit one- as well as two-proton radioactivity. We attribute the two-proton emission behaviour and the unexpectedly large probability for this decay mechanism to a very large deformation of the parent nucleus into a prolate (cigar-like) shape, which facilitates emission of protons either from the same or from opposite ends of the 'cigar'.